Studying Notes on Elixir

Elixir is a Erlang VM (BEAM) based language (http://elixir-lang.org/). This post serves as a note and thoughts while exploring this language.

On Installation

1. It is much easier to install Erlang and Elixir via Homebrew, if you are using Mac, you definitely should consider this route

brew install elixir
brew install erlang

On Syntax

1. true and :true are the same, same goes to false and :false. These have data type of booleans
2. Constants, or symbols are called atoms. For example :hello is an atom.
3.  The atom version of booleans (i.e. :true and :false) are special cases, and will be treated as booleans.  As can be shown below by the interactive output of Elixir. Note :hello is an atom, but not a boolean
iex(7)> is_boolean :true
true
iex(8)> is_boolean :false
true
iex(9)> is_atom :true
true
iex(10)> is_atom :false
true
iex(11)> is_boolean :hello
false
iex(12)> is_atom :hello 

On Erlang

There is a very good introductory video on Erlang by Bob Ippolito here.

Erlang is a functional language first implemented by Ericsson for telecommunication equipment 20 years ago. Given the nature of this type of equipment, Erlang is designed to be small (memory was expensive then), very reliable (able to hot-swap the running code), and concurrent (hundred thousand of instances at the same time).

I watched the whole video and enjoyed every bit of it.

Here are some more links related to Erlang:

http://www.trapexit.org/

http://www.erlang.org/

I am trying to learn one more language to fill my time, or fill my hollowness. How much more to fill? Maybe another eight years....?

Not my choice...

...